I just built an i7-4770 based desktop and last night I installed Gentoo using the standard instructions (modified for UEFI). I didn't see this post until today.

I saw that I might run into some issues with the stable version of gcc, so I switched to ~amd64 from the very beginning, and upgraded gcc to 4.7 as soon as I could. That let me use -march=native to compile the rest without errors, but I would love to switch up to gcc 4.8.1, and re-emerge everything.

I used to use Gentoo many years ago, but at some point I switched to Debian stable, so my Gentoo knowledge is pretty rusty. I apologize in advance if these are silly questions:

Is your stage3 built from ~amd64? (Will it result in a ~amd64 system?)

Without starting over from scratch, what is the easiest way for me to get my system to the same state that starting from your stage3 would give me?

Am I using an old mirror, or did you have to do something special to get gcc 4.8.1?

I plan on using ~amd64, and I just finished going through the base install, so I haven't installed much of anything else yet, as I would like to get my gcc up to 4.8.1 and rebuild everything first.

I installed gentoo on my newly built Haswell PC (i7-4470) using the above stage3, which really helped a lot, so thanks to the OP.

I'm using CFLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe", no problem in 3 weeks of gentooing.
I'm using default desktop profile with xfce4, firefox. Didn't run in any build problems during installation at all.
gcc 4.8.1 was recompiled during an emerge -uNDpv world early on however, didn't check exactly why, maybe change in use flags._________________regards
- andy